WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
Another day without supply work so more time spent on my new bliki at contribute.mrbelshaw.co.uk, a contribution to Ed’s onedamnthing.org.uk wiki, an application form filled in and letter written, a swift bike ride, a bit of housework and too much time browsing eBay. Time to process what I’ve been thinking about a skills-based curriculum… 
The word curriculum comes from the Latin word currere which means ‘to run’ or ‘race’.
The page at Wikipedia on curriculum currently has this to say:
In education, a curriculum (plural curricula) is the set of courses and their contents offered by an institution such as a school or university. In some cases, a curriculum may be partially or entirely determined by an external body (such as the National Curriculum for England in English schools)…
A crucial part of the curriculum is the definition of the course objectives which are often expressed in terms of learning outcomes and normally includes the assessment strategy for the programme. These learning outcomes (and assessments) are often grouped into units (or modules) and the curriculum, therefore, comprises a collection of such units, each specialising on a specific part of the curriculum. So a typical curriculum would include units on communications, numeracy, information technology, inter-personal skills together with more specialised provision.
The curriculum - as it says in above - is set out in England. There are schemes of work which are more or less dictatorial and fixed (depending on subject) and teachers, departments, faculties, and schools have varying levels of control over what students are taught. Before the National Curriculum was introduced schools had a choice over what subjects to offer (although in practice most offered the same, but with varying emphases). The 1988 reform brought in testing at the end of Key Stages 1, 2 and 3 and compelled schools to offer certain subjects. League tables were introduced, with the idea being to create a ‘market’ in education where schools would compete for students. The theory was that with parental choice over which school to send their offspring, and with commonality of curriculum and testing, bad schools would eventually be forced to close due to having too few ‘customers’. Needless to say this prediction turned out to be somewhat wide of the mark… 
So we are left with a curriculum that compels schools to teach an increasing number of subjects upon which students will be tested every few years. The results of these tests are published in the public domain meaning that, unsurprisingly, a great deal of ‘teaching to the test’ goes on. This can be explicitly through going through exam papers ad infinitum or implicitly through presenting the course through which students progress in a highly-structured manner. BOCTAOE.
Many have derided the current system and indeed the Tomlinson report of 2004 was expected to shake up the 14-19 curriculum in England with more vocational options and a more integrated approach. It’s proposals, including the eventual abolition of the GCSE and A Level examinations were watered down in the 14-19 Education and Skills White Paper, published in February 2005. So the current examinations remain with the supposed-to-be-equal-but-actually-looked-down-upon vocational options expanded.
The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) has published Subject to Change: new thinking on the curriculum which seeks to provoke ‘renewed national debate on early years and school curricula’ due to ‘widespread dissatisfaction with the uneasy settlement represented in the current National Curriculum.’
A 21st century curriculum cannot have the transfer of knowledge at its core, for the simple reason that selection of what is required has become problematic in an information rich age…
ATL proposes a national curriculum model which starts from pupil needs and interests and is designed in terms of the skills and attitudes which we want pupils to acquire and develop.
There should be a light national curriculum framework setting out the skills and attitudes which pupils need now and in the future for employment, caring roles and citizenship. These should be generic skills, rather than an attempt to ‘second guess’ the actual skills which will be required, for example, by employers. ATL believes that there is a universal set of skills needed by all young people in Britain, so that the national curriculum should be truly comprehensive, with no need for different pathways for ‘different kinds of pupils’.
Although I am not a member of the ATL I agree with the above. Gone is the time when education dealt with the transfer of knowledge from one generation to another. Knowledge is no longer so valuable as we are bombarded with it every day. A while ago I read (but frustratingly can’t remember the source) that around a hundred years ago it would take around six months for a person to come across eight significant pieces of information. Today it takes less than a day to run into that many. Clearly a different approach is needed in education:
We have more information being presented to us than we can possibly encode and remember. Our personal abilities are far exceeded by the amount of information created in the modern world, and so ours has become a problem of deciding which information sources to attend to, and which information systems to use when we do not know something. In order to make use of an existing store of information we need to understand how the information within it is organised, and how to access it.
(J.D.M. Underwood & G. Underwood, Computers and Learning: helping children acquire thinking skills (Oxford, 1990), p.60)
I’m realistic enough (or perhaps conditioned enough) to realise that changes in education are achieved through evolution, not revolution. To that end, I’ve put different organizations’ (both governmental and otherwise) information that pertains to skill-based curricula on the relevant page at contribute.mrbelshaw.co.uk. If you’ve read down this far you’re obviously interested in the subject (pardon the pun) so please feel free to register on the bliki and add more material. Whilst most wikis have a concern for neutrality, I’m more interested in a cacophony of voices, conflicting opinions and, to be honest, downright rants about what is the best way forward. Feel free to object to what I and other people say, but try not to delete other people’s stuff… 
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